Pro-Life Group Targets Atheists, Agnostics and 'Nones' to Stand Up Against Abortion

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(Photo: Secular Pro-Life Facebook)Secular Pro-Life began in 2009 as an initiative to mobilize individuals who disagreed with abortion but claimed no religious identity.

Secular Pro-Life has launched a campaign this week to reach out to atheists and agnostics who are against abortion.

"Every week, we get an email from someone to the effect of 'I thought I was the only pro-life atheist!'" said Kelsey Hazzard, the president of Secular Pro-Life said on the organization's blog. "It gets lonely out there. Non-religious pro-lifers are not often acknowledged in the mainstream media. This creates a vicious cycle; people think they're alone, which makes them less likely to speak out for life, which makes others more likely to think they're alone."

"One in Six Million," takes its name from Secular Pro-Life's rough estimate of the non-religiously affiliated pro-life supporters and is an effort to encourage the group to be more vocal.

"We know that many non-religious Americans hesitate to self-identify as pro-life because it is unacceptable in their social circles; many have only "come out" to Secular Pro-Life. Compounding the problem, people with no religion are also more likely than average to believe (wrongly) that the pro-choice position commands a majority," Secular Pro-Life explains on its website.

To build more solidarity and momentum, Secular Pro-Life is asking pro-life, non-religiously affiliated individuals to post pictures of themselves with signs reading "1 in six million" to their website.

The organization also explained since the 1960s, pro-abortion activists have "deliberately framed abortion in religious terms," but that they seek to organize themselves as another political block which "will become impossible to ignore."

Christian pro-life group Live Action promoted Secular Pro-Life on Wednesday and explained the importance of broadening the coalition of those opposing abortions.

"Undoubtedly, conservative Christians largely comprise the pro-life movement in America. But too frequently the tendency is to assign this identity of "pro-life" solely to conservative Christians, when this is not at all the case. The perception that only conservative Christians are pro-life is a boon to the pro-abortion movement, which has developed the self-serving stereotype that the pro-life movement is not inclusive or diverse," Lauren Enriquez wrote on Live Action's blog.

Secular Pro-Life was established in 2009 with the intent to "end selective abortion." The organization "envisions a world in which abortion is unthinkable and unwanted" and where "women have and embrace control over whether they carry a pregnancy by controlling whether they conceive at all."

While the group does support legal abortion restrictions, they also have called for paid maternity leave, increasing adoption support, and creating crisis pregnancy centers. They also have called for greater education about abortion alternatives, abortion risks, and comprehensive sex education.